Unless higher education planning issues are addressed, including the funding and relevance of the products of tertiary institutions to the development of a modern economy, Ghana will not be able to meet her manpower needs and, for that matter, the nation’s developmental aspirations.
The President of Accra Institute of Technology (AIT), Professor Clement K. Dzidonu, who made the observation at the 10th Congregation of the Institute in Accra, also attributed the phenomenon of unemployed/unemployable graduates to the fact that universities were producing graduates not needed by the economy.
“We cannot as a nation continue to produce some types of graduates that the economy does not need and fail to produce enough of those that the economy demands.”
He said in spite of making progress in the area of addressing regulatory issues in respect to quality and standards pertaining to higher education delivery, the country had done little in the area of planning higher education to meet national developmental goals and aspirations.
Consequently, there was an acute lack of data on manpower requirements and demand of the various sectors of the economy, that was essential to determining the supply of graduate outputs to meet national demands.
It was crucial, however, that the nation should be able to strike the right balance between the demand and supply of graduates across various skills as part of a national higher education planning process, and regular national human resource gap analysis, to serve as a basis for the Government to set quotas for graduate output in key fields and professions.
“In the absence of this national planning exercise, we at AIT are doing all we can to listen to industry to determine its human resource needs as a way of ensuring that our graduates are not only employable, but also do end up getting employments that match their respective specializations.
“At AIT, we are innovative in the design of our academic programs, and I can assure you that all our accredited programs are not only internationally benchmarked, but more importantly customized for the job-market of the future”, Professor Dzidonu declared.
He said AIT was currently offering accredited campus-based programmes in affiliation with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in the fields of Information Technology, Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Business Administration.
The Institute also offered Open University programmes in collaboration with the Open University, Malaysia (OUM) at the Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels, he said, adding that AIT was currently doing PhD research work in Engineering, Information Technology, Education, and Business Administration.
At the ceremony eight graduates were awarded PhDs, 23 received Master’s, with158 obtaining Bachelor’s degrees.
Professor Dzidonu further announced that over 250 PhD students are now enrolled at AIT, making the Institute one of the leading postgraduate research institutions on the African continent.
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Source: GNA